An HDG method for convection diffusion equation (Q283318)

A new hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method for the convection-diffusion problem on general polyhedral meshes is presented. This new HDG method is a generalization of HDG methods for linear elasticity introduced in [\textit{W. Qiu} et al., ``An HDG method for linear elasticity with strong symmetric stresses'', \url{arXiv:1312.1407}] to problems with convection term. For arbitrary polyhedral elements, the authors use polynomials of degree \(k+1\) and \(k\geq 0\) to approximate the scalar variable and its gradient, respectively. Whereas polynomials of degree \(k\) are used to approximate the numerical trace of the scalar variable on the faces which allows for a very efficient implementation of the method, since the numerical trace of the scalar variable is the only globally coupled unknown. It is shown that the global \(L^2\)-norm of the error of the scalar variable converges with the order \(k+2\) while that of its gradient converges with order \(k+1\). A key inequality relevant to the discrete Poincaré inequality is a novel theoretical contribution. This inequality is useful for instance when dealing with convection terms and it is essential to error analysis of HDG methods for the Navier-Stokes equations and other nonlinear problems.